How to Use 4USXUS to Find Out What Your Congressional Representatives Are up To
We’ve all heard the importance of paying attention to Congress, especially during election season, but how many of us actually know how to do this? 4USXUS is my new favorite tool because it simplifies it. Or at least as simple as politics itself can be.
4USXUS is a non-partisan website that gives you an amazing overview of how your government works and how you truly fit your elected officials. We’ve talked about this before , but today we want to dive into the details of how it works.
First, find out who your representatives are.
Fast! Can you name three of your representatives in Congress? If you are like many Americans, you may not even be aware that there are three to look out for. Hell, a lot of Americans don’t even know their spokesman’s party . If you belong to a group that cannot name which members of Congress you can vote for, 4USXUS will start by telling you.
For those who missed the civil law lessons, you have two people in the Senate representing your state, as well as one person in the House of Representatives from your district. This is your big three . They have been chosen precisely to represent you. You are their voters, which means they have an incentive to listen to your voice (that incentive is your voice). After you create an account with 4USXUS and enter your address, the site will show you three politicians who represent you.
Ideally, you should know who these people are before they are elected. I hope you would have voted for them or against them in the last election. However, everyone needs to start somewhere. If your eyes have dimmed during the last election, or if you just want to know what your representatives have been up to, now is your chance.
Examine the voting history of your representatives
Now that you’ve found your reps, it’s time to find out what they’re working on. Click on one of them and you will be taken to the profile page. At the top of your profile, you will see a box with many links. Here you will find their bio on the Congress website, their own homepage, their social media information, and their phone number, if available. If you scroll down a bit, you’ll find their Twitter feed embedded on the left side of the page.
However, real meat is in the activity stream. Here you can see what bills your elected officials have sponsored (or co-sponsored) and see how they voted on various bills. There’s also a comment section if you want to talk directly to your reps, because obviously nobody thought it could go badly.
If you’ve voted in favor of any bill (we’ll come back to that in the next section), you’ll also be able to see how your votes compare to your officials. There are also many approval ratings all over the place. The site will compare how a given politician voted generally against, how 4USXUS users vote on bills, how Congress in general, and how you vote on bills in particular, to give you an idea of how many of your representatives are added to various indicators. The most useful metric is obviously comparing your representatives to your own votes, but this gets complicated.
Learn about bills before (and after) they became laws
When you click on a bill, you can get an overview of what it does and how your officials voted for it. You can also view all the available bills in Congress by clicking Bills in the navigation bar on the left side of the site under the Overview section. Here rubber meets the political road. This is also the hardest part because, as it turns out, the laws are complex.
The invoice page is very informative but can be confusing if you are not used to reading in legal language. You can read the full invoice text (if available) on the Invoice Text tab if you want more information. For the layperson, the Bill’s Summary tab will provide the most concise information on what the bill intends to do, but keep in mind that both are written by members of Congress themselves. For this reason, there is also a comments section where users can discuss the bill, raise concerns or questions, and discuss the merits of the bill itself.
If you’ve ever thought it was easy to manage, this process is likely to humble you. I expected that it would be simple to vote on which bills I like to see how my votes compare to my elected officials. First, I checked the controversial CISA . I knew a little about this, so I voted “no” and learned that two of my representatives voted “for”. Interesting! However, the 4USXUS timeline says that nothing has happened to him since he was passed by the Senate in October 2015. But from the news, I know that CISA was later attached to the Aggregate Expenditure Bill and passed in December. It was impossible to find out from this page alone.
It got even more difficult when I started looking at other accounts. For example, the FAST Act looked like a basic road infrastructure bill. However, I learned from the discussions that there are sections at the end (which I don’t understand) dealing with banking regulation. Is it relevant? Are they good, or should I be thinking about something unrelated? Am I entitled to answer this? Then I looked at the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Improvement Act of 2016 and lost the remaining confidence that I knew anything about politics.
Much of the problem here has to do with the complex nature of politics in general. The invoice billed to the name of the other passenger does not say whether it is questionable or not. There is no notification process to let you know when a failed account joins a larger one. Laws in general are intended to be read by lawyers and not by laymen. Although the site helps to analyze some information, it can only do so, given the complex process that it covers.
Continue your research on your own
After a while, looking through the accounts and trying to determine my own votes, I realized that this work is more difficult than I thought. There is a reason why we vote for representatives in office, and not for every person in the country who votes on every issue individually. You simply cannot expect everyone to be able to make rational and wise decisions about everything.
However, it is also important that everyone can find out what is going on in their government. From this point of view, the 4USXUS is an ideal starting point. This site won’t tell you everything you need to know about your government, but it will give you the opportunity to know what you should research. Once you know who your representatives are, you can learn more about them and their competitors in election years. You can even look at the individual accounts to see how much you agree or disagree with them before you find out too late in the news.
It’s unlikely that you will be able to keep up with every score (and if you can, then maybe you should get into politics), but 4USXUS is a great resource. It provides the framework you need to see how your representatives vote and how much you really agree with them.